


Give a cheer for all the broken

by Elsinore_and_Inverness



Category: Discworld - Terry Pratchett
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Childhood, Constant switching between writing in past and present tense apparently, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Implied Vetinari/Vimes and Vetinari/Drumknott, The People's Revolution of the Glorious Twenty-Fifth of May, The salmon and otters scene is a bit gory, school trauma (thinly veiled american primary school hell)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-17
Updated: 2020-09-17
Packaged: 2021-03-08 03:33:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,215
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26509042
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Elsinore_and_Inverness/pseuds/Elsinore_and_Inverness
Summary: For some reason when I read the "When he had been a little boy he had seen a showman" line in Sourcery, my brain immediately started playing "Welcome To The Black Parade" ...So here's the songfic!
Relationships: Roberta Meserole & Havelock Vetinari
Comments: 6
Kudos: 11





	Give a cheer for all the broken

**When I was a young boy**

**My father took me into the city**

_Fioritura. UC 1956._

There used to be a building on this plot of land. It was in ruins the first time Havelock saw it. He watched it being torn down as his father or aunt walked him to the guild school.

The Wool Guild had the children of members learn to spin and weave, more to keep them occupied then anything else. Havelock’s fingers at age six, already bony, almost claw-like, were nimble but not strong. They wanted to touch the world without grasping. His hands slipped and threads broke and got tangled and the fact that he was better at it then most people did not enter at all into how frustrated he was by this. Anything less then perfect was not good enough.

Now the empty lot had been reclaimed by the world. Fast-growing trees and bushes and flowers cover the space from wall to wall. Havelock knew the names of all the plants in that lot. _Laurus nobilis_ , that his father Lorens had named himself after, lauro, laurentius, unacknowledged ruler of the city of flowers, _Daucus carota_ that looked like lace with a drop of blood, tangled at the roots with _Conium maculatum_ , poison hemlock, unstained lace. Dandelions, thistles, and nettles, being edible plants, made the lot seem like a garden, abundant resilience spilling into the empty space. He would crawl in amongst the plants and tear the soft green leaves and eat them. The thrum of insects wrapped him in early evening.

One afternoon when his father came to find him he said, “We’re going to Piazza del Quadrato.”

This was a large square where people sold useless things that broke within the hour or handed out questionable books or played songs that were popular twenty to a hundred years ago or painted skeuomorphic holes in the ground. Havelock had, on a number of occasions, climbed halfway up the base of the statue in the fountain at the center of the square to watch the sun set down the wobbly corridor of streets reaching to the edge of the city.

That evening there was a plate spinner who had set up two collapsible wooden railings with attachment points for flexible poles. He started each plate spinning on his hand before reaching up on tiptoe to place it on top of the pole. There was a controlled franticness to the act in two layers, making it look effortless and making it look impossible. The sense that it would go like clockwork with absolute predictability unless you made a mistake and the inevitability that you were going to make a mistake, that you couldn’t be fast enough, observant enough. It had to be impossible to tell what was part of the act and it had to seem like everything was part of the act. The way the plate spinner ran from one end of the railing to the other reminded Havelock of how his father and his aunt would insist on sitting at opposite ends of the long dining table.

After about two and a half minutes Havelock is bored. “Papà?”

“Pipistrellino, what is it?” his father calls him ‘little bat’ and he feels small and safe.

“I’m tired.”

Lorens picks up the little boy and Havelock falls asleep ten minutes later. The lamplighters were lighting the candles as he carried him home.

**To see a marching band**

_Hasturian Alps. Rimward extremity of the Ramtops. UC 1957._

At the end of April the sheep are shorn. Lorens was finalizing the routes by which the wool will be brought into the city. There was a band playing with flutes and bagpipes.

Emilio di Lippo was the son of the head clerk of the Wool Guild and Havelock tried not to follow him around. Emilio’s hair looked like rubies. It was nearly black but in direct sunlight it looked like there were sparkles of red.

Havelock knew the words for people like his fathers, even if George wasn’t around anymore. Emilio said “in friendship” and “only as a friend” when Havelock wanted to hold his hand or dance in a stone barn halfway up a mountain at a sheep shearing festival—spinning, spinning until centrifugal force meant a split lip (Havelock) and a concussion (Emilio) and parents telling them not to play together (both of them).

Lying in bed with linen pressed to his mouth, Havelock listened to his father tell him about how he, Lorens, as a child had once tied a long piece of string to a rock and spun it around and then let go which was why there was a scar in his eyebrow. Havelock felt a flame of defiance at that comparison. Emilio wasn’t a rock tied to a string.

But he never saw Emilio again.

Emilio said “as a friend” so often Havelock doubted what he thought he felt about the boy. But he knew the words. He thought Emilio was a genius. He built models out of straw and tree sap.

Emilio ended up building five basilicas and adopting two children. 

**Because one day, I’ll leave you**

**A phantom to lead you in the summer**

_The Genua/Uberwald Border. UC 1958._

On the road to the city of Genua Lady Meserole and Havelock stopped at an inn. Before the fall of the House of Vetinari, they would have been entertained at grand houses, not so anymore. A messenger arrived that night with a letter from a sea captain. Roberta read it. Havelock read it upside down. He’d never been punched in the stomach or slapped across the face but he imagined it must feel something like this.

Finding a seam to tear from, he tore the tunic he wore over his shirt. Roberta watched this without saying anything.

They were alone now. The last of the House of Vetinari.

“Can I hug you?” Roberta asks her brother’s son.

Havelock’s eyes feel like deep wells of boiling water. “Do you need to?”

“You shouldn’t be the one looking after me.”

“I would like… to not be touched. Where is our room?”

“Room 3. It’s only a straw mattress.”

Havelock lays face down on the bed, the straw poking his nose. The boiling wells of his eyes do not overflow.

His aunt calls him ‘pipistrellino’ for the last time.

She blows out the candles.

**A world that sends you reeling**

**From decimated dreams**

_Woods in Uberwald. UC 1958._

There’s something about glacial runoff. The way it tears, white and grey, through a white and grey landscape.

Roberta had tried to send Havelock to a school in Genua but he ended up being punished nearly every day. For talking in the hallway. For talking during lunch. For getting into arguments about the definitions of words. For encouraging a football game that used breadfruit as a ball. For staring at teachers. For not making eye contact with teachers. For suggesting amendments to the curriculum. For sharpening a quill himself instead of “asking an adult.” For participating in a culture of resistance and solidarity against the expulsion of students who got into fights. For writing about the wrong topics. For explaining what the teacher who said horrible things about the way he looked and moved had said. It happened so often that he stopped talking about it. And then stopped talking entirely. They punished him for that too. They didn’t hit him. They made him sit in a chalked square on the floor for hours and threatened to send him away somewhere.

There were large biting flies up there, a handful of degrees out from the Hubland circle, fewer, now that it was autumn.

The banks of the river are steep and stony. Havelock watches the water and sleek brown shapes come up from below the surface. They’re river otters and they are utterly joyous. They arch out of the water and paddle with fluid webbed feet and run into each other and play. Their noses wiggle when they come up to breathe and Havelock feels a smile reaching across his face. 

Then one of them dives behind a log and drags something out of the water. It dunks the salmon back it the water and for a moment Havelock thinks the otter is still playing. Then it drags the fish up onto the log. Its mouth is opening and closing, the hooked curve of the salmon’s jaw gasping with what looks like desperation, tail thrashing weakly with exhaustion. It has swum all the way from the ocean. The otter pins it to the log with paws like hands and bites the underside of the fish and eggs spill out, big as pearls, pink as flowers, clear as dawn. The baby otters press their faces into the salmon, fur becoming covered in red blood. The other adult otter tears one of the gills off the salmon. It keeps breathing; the mouth keeps opening and closing. The mother otter tears off the dorsal fin. The tail keeps beating the log. The otters chew at a leisurely pace. The salmon manages to move its head and Havelock feels like a fist is closing around his heart. He watches, mesmerized and horror-struck as the salmon continues to move and breathe until it is half-eaten, a living corpse clinging to life.

This is the world, he thinks. If there is a deity in charge, they have authorized this. This is the pattern, in miniature, of all sustenance, of all life and death.

The otters look at him, as he walks away, with dark intelligent eyes and bloodstained whiskers and for some reason he looks back at them and says “Thank you.” 

**We want it all, we wanna play this part**

**I won’t explain or say I’m sorry**

_Morphic Street. UC 1966. A-Timeline_

Winder’s police are breaking down the door. Havelock grabs the person nearest him and drags him to the back of the room.

“Window. Now.”

Claude Maximillian Overton Transpire Dibbler gapes at the thirty-foot drop. “But how?”

Havelock takes off his long Assassin’s coat, wraps it into a ball and throws it out the window. Then he tears strips off of the grey-green rags he’s wearing underneath and hands them to Dibbler.

“How?”

“Drainpipe.”

Dibbler looks at the drainpipe. It’s covered in bolts and welding and sheets of bent metal affixing it to the wall. Not seeing any better option, he wraps the fabric around his hands and slides painfully down the drainpipe. He looks around for the Assassin, but he’s melted into the night.

_Morphic Street and Treacle Mine Road. UC 1966. B-Timeline_

“Where are we headed?” CMOT Dibbler asks, jogging to keep up with the crowd. The conspiracy had received a warning and had fled the building. Now they were gathering people to join them.

“Treacle Mine Road,” said the Assassin who couldn’t even be said to be walking very quickly he was so tall.

“Why?”

“Because we were told to.”

“That doesn’t sound like much of a reason.”

“How about, because we are?”

“I’ll take it.”

The Assassin takes in a gulp of still night air. “I’ll be watching from the rooftops. Step in if someone’s not playing fair.”

“Sounds good.”

**And through it all, the rise and fall**

**The bodies in the streets**

_Small Gods. UC 1967._

He’d returned to Ankh-Morpork under cover of darkness. It was the night of the 26th of May. Technically the 27th. It was three in the morning. There was eggshell on Sergeant Keel’s grave. Someone had put a hard-boiled egg there and the birds had gotten it. He picked up the pieces of eggshell and looked at them on his palm. He straightened the flowers that had been beaten by wind and rain and picked up the ones that had been trampled over the past two days. The crushed flowers smelled like sweet decay. Cloying, forcing images into his mind of death and killing.

Where were the men he had killed buried? In a churchyard? Near the Temple of Blind Io? Nearby but he didn’t know it because he didn’t know their names?

He felt a mad impulse to kiss Keel’s gravestone.

He needed to go soon. Snapcase did not enforce curfew, but he wasn’t safe here. Bats flitted overhead, weaving among the poplars. In Überwald they would be a spy, or pieces of multiple spies. Here they were just little bats.

**Because the world will never take my heart**

**Go and try, you’ll never break me**

_Oblong Office. UC 1994._

Drumknott walked into the room carrying what looked like a shoebox with wires running across it.

“What’s that?” Vetinari asked as though the box might explode at any moment.

“Music with rocks in. Leonard figured out how it worked.”

Vetinari looked even more convinced that the box was going to explode.

“Here, I’ll—“ Drumknott set the box on the desk and Vetinari scambled away from it. “I’ll just turn it on.”

The sound of drums and a guitar and a keyboard came out of the box.

“That’s alright, isn’t it?” Drumknott looked at Vetinari.

Vetinari was tapping a foot and nodding his head.

Smiling, Drumknott pulls the curtains further open and he’s dancing. Vetinari has never seen Drumknott dancing before. He’s not very good at it, and it is wonderful.


End file.
